Don’t Cheer The Reaper: Death Inc.

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Death Inc. is a marvellous, horrible, brilliant, horrible idea. It’s this: “Guide Grim T. Livingstone, freelance reaper, through 1660’s England spreading fear, pestilence and most importantly, the bubonic plague.” You play a reaper in a cartoon 17th century, and your job is to harvest… people. Horrible, eh? But it looks so cute! Death Inc. is currently being developed by a team of former Lionhead, Media Molecule and Criterion devs – called Ambient Studios – and their mission is to create a “streamlined strategy, with no micromanagement or complex menus.” Their first game boasts a bunch of intriguing ideas, including the idea of “painting” your commands: “Paint with pestilence: Create routes to travel, areas to defend and flanking manoeuvres with simple mouse strokes.”

We’ve contact ambient for more information, because we suspect we’re going to want to keep a close eye on this one.

Seeing how you asked there’s Swords and Soldiers, Atom Zombie Smasher, XCOM(new version), Unity of Command and we haven’t even started on board games yet.

I love a good in depth strategy game too but easily the most common cause of death in the genre is collapsing under it’s own bloated weight. Sometime less is more. More is sometimes more too but if you’re going down that path you need to be really good or really lucky to get away with it.

Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Spore (flawed but still some neat ideas), and Darwinia, to name a few.

I’m a fan of deep strategy games too, but there’s room for more than one approach to strategy games. Especially when the theme is fairly light-hearted like Pirates!… and possibly this one also, based on the graphics and potential comedy in the idea.

I may be wrong but isnt Razorramone’s point that being streamlined isn’t something games should aspire to but embrace theircomplexity instead? In which case it’s not particularly significant whether a game is actually streamlined or merely describes itself as such. Both require an intent on the part of the designers that he would disagree with.

It doesn’t sound much like Plague Inc at all. Which is too bad, because I’d love to see a fully rendered version of that game, in which you can zoom into regions or even cities and have stuff to do, as well as watch people puke their guts out.